Frank Gehry, the 88-year-old Pritzker Prize-winning architect of the Cubist-like Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and other imaginative buildings, famously conceives his designs with abstract sketches and models.

More than 1,000 of those sketches and models — along with hundreds of thousands of drawings, slides and ephemera from 1954 to 1988 — have been acquired by the Getty Research Institute, part of the trust that includes the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where Mr. Gehry’s architecture firm is based.

The archive covers Mr. Gehry’s nascent career, when he designed humble yet daring private houses and studios that were crucial in building his reputation after graduating from the University of Southern California in 1954, through his winning competition entry for the Disney Hall in 1988. He won the Pritzker, the top prize in architecture, in 1989.

Thomas Gaehtgens, the research institute’s director, said that the archive includes items that “were so important to developing into an international star architect.”

(Mr. Gehry, in interviews, has rejected the label “starchitect.” In a statement, he said he was honored that “things that I never thought anyone would be interested in” have found a home at the Getty.)

The archive joins other high-profile collections at the institute, whose architecture holdings include projects by Pierre Koenig, Philip Johnson and Zaha Hadid. Maristella Casciato, the senior curator of architectural collections, said in a statement that Mr. Gehry’s work provides insights into postwar culture.

“The collection details important architectural trajectories in the decades which witnessed shifts away from high modernism to early postmodern vocabularies, and then to high-tech and digital architectures,” Ms. Casciato said. “Frank Gehry was a powerful figure in this evolution.”

To complement the archive, Mr. Gaehtgens said, the institute plans to work with Mr. Gehry to record oral histories of his projects. Drawings and models for the Disney Hall, which was completed in 2003, will also be displayed next month in the Getty exhibition “Berlin/Los Angeles: A Space for Music,” which showcases Mr. Gehry’s concert hall and Hans Scharoun’s seminal midcentury design for the Berlin Philharmonie.